Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I speak to the whole House when I say that the subject of the legislation we find ourselves debating on the floor here today is the rent-to-own industry and the need to have some floor of regulations over that industry. There are 15 million citizens who annually use rent-to-own stores. There has been an exhaustive study, a survey of rent-to-own by the Federal Trade Commission. In fact, they made several suggestions and proposals. They outlined abuses in the industry. Let me speak to that industry. That industry is an industry, like many others, that people, their only connection with it is they drive by a store, and we see more and more rent-to-own stores in their neighborhood or in their city, but they do not know much about it. What the survey found is that people of all educational levels apparently are using rent-to-own. The number of people that have graduate school degrees, a good percentage of those people are using these stores. Sometimes people go in and they rent equipment, rent furniture for as little as a month or 2 months, or even 2 weeks. I recently talked to someone that said they had gone in a rent-to-own store, and their explanation was that they were going to be in a city for 2 months and they simply did not want to get a U-Haul. They checked on the U-Haul rate, and it was $900 out and $900 back, and so they made a decision to spend $1,500 on furniture.”